Томас Кенэлли: The Widow and Her Hero

We four hid on a small volcanic hill. The Japanese did not pursue us. Mel’s bowman had tried to swim for it, and late that night his body came washing back up, before the Japanese had even removed Filmer and Mel and taken them away by launch. It happened they were taken to a prison on a large island named Singkep Island, off Sumatra, and the base for the Japanese who’d attacked us.

Jockey and I, wounded Chesty and Pat Bantry – we all managed to find our folboats lying in the mangroves on the southern end of NE27. We took to the water but we were suddenly out of steam. We made little more than eight miles before dawn, when we put into the island of Selajar, and we dragged ourselves ashore. We were sheltering in an abandoned native hut when we heard the barges land and the shouts of Japanese officers. I could hear them coming in the undergrowth, and I had my loaded pistol, but I remembered Lieutenant Carlaw, and it struck me all at once to ask, What would any of it mean if I shot them and they shot me? Was that cowardice? The question didn’t even worry me. I didn’t even think of my poison. Poison had never been stressed anyhow. I have to say – it’s no excuse – but I had some of Jockey’s fever by then, so they entered the hut and I stood there stupidly with my pistol pointed, and a tall NCO came to me and knocked me down with a rifle butt. There was a bit more beating on the beach, before we too were put on a barge and came in the darkness to the stone cells in the old Dutch prison at Darbo. We were each put in a separate cell, except Chesty, who’d been taken to hospital. Filmer and Mel were already there. We were able to yell to each other, cell to cell. It was a comfort. We rested in the end. There was a ratty thin floor mattress in each of our cells.

Bantry and Skeeter Moss were soon brought in too, and each placed in his separate cell. There was a comforting feeling in that whatever was to happen to us would happen to all of us.

I’ve been through those islands on a liner. I’ve left the cooled interior of the QE2 and walked out on the rather narrow decks, designed more for the Atlantic than the Pacific, and felt the sun like a blow on the neck and the shoulders. To spend a day in mangrove swamps under that sun would bring on madness if not fever. I know Indonesian civilisation is ancient, but it feels out there on deck as if all that is impossible, as if morality and culture are called off or driven out of the blood by the ferocity of heat. The joggers and walkers on the deck greet me, getting their aerobics over before the full muscle of the sun makes it impossible. And I flee inside, ashamed at choosing to be a pallid woman, stricken by that misery my husband Laurie can sense and wants to assuage and can’t understand, since I was the one who talked him into this voyage. Always failing the young hero, always missing him, always enraged.

On one of the islands, Bintang, Leo was tortured and sodomised with a baton.

We were thrown like fence posts into the bottom of one of their patrol boats and moved to a gaol on Bintang Island. This was a worse place, a Kempei Tai compound. It was bad. For a start, Blinkhorn now had malaria as well as his thigh wound and we could hear him calling to us and talking about such things as getting the cows milked and hay-baling, urgent things that he brought from his life on the family farm. Bantry, a cow-cocky himself, would sometimes answer him to soothe him down. Chesty was still raving when I was taken out of my cell to the interrogation room for questioning, and was sat down on a chair on that hosed cement floor.

I was soon kneeling on a piece of wood, and then somehow I was spread-eagled by the wall. So I must tell you this. Some dreadful thing happened there, with an NCO of the Kempei Tai. I don’t mind being beaten, I’m sure we do the same. But this was… Yes, this was a violation. I hate to tell you but I have to. They pushed a baton into my body. Damn him to the pit, that’s all I can say. And I’m telling you – I don’t know why – because it’s necessary for you to know that I’ve lived through that and that I’m still Leo.

Straight afterwards I felt all the shame was on me, but I’ve got to a stage now where I know the shame’s on the mongrel who did it. Since you’re a wise girl, you’d expect something like that might have happened, and you might have thought that it haunted me – well, it does, but it doesn’t. It doesn’t weigh on me. The Kempei Tai. Bastards.

The rest was beating and making me kneel on a piece of wood and one awful bloody session when they put a hosepipe down my throat and just pumped water in. I gave them nothing. I certainly didn’t mention the SBs. As far as I know all the others gave them nothing. I think we were as surprised as anyone. The sort of pain they put us in just made us angry. Even the drowning torture. That should have got us talking as soon as we got our breath back. The only thing was they already seemed to know a lot about us. One day they put Jockey and me and Chesty, who was somehow recovering, pure bush vigour, on a Kempei Tai launch at the wharf at Bintang – we just lay on the deck under the sun, roped together, sweating and done for, no more stories to tell each other, and not fit to hear them if there were. It was Christmas Eve but we didn’t know it. The launch set sail and we came into the Singapore docks proper. We landed so close to Kempei Tai headquarters that they walked us there along Tandjung Pagar. I think the first Singapore laugh we had was when we saw that the place had been the Chinese YMCA – it said so over the door. Young Men’s Christian Association. We all said it aloud, and we all hooted, and our guards belted us. But it’s funny how kind of immune you get to being belted. One of those hitting us was a Malay Heiho, another one was Chinese, and the other two were Japanese Kempei Tai soldiers. Having a joke was more important than their authority.

On the way in through the lobby, I saw Hidaka the first time. I didn’t know his name then. I couldn’t have told him from the other officers that were around, except that he was wearing a white suit with no insignia.

When Leo saw Hidaka, the interpreter was on his way to a meeting. He has told Lydon and others, reliably or not, that at that meeting at Water Kempei Tai headquarters it was decided by his superiors that in general torture wasn’t going to work. They’d already tried it at Bintang, and they’d tried it on Private Appin, the cricketer, who’d been captured and taken to Surabaya where they beat him senseless, and no doubt subjected him to the repertoire of torture, and they had got nothing from him. I hope such a conference as Hidaka claimed did take place, and that it was now decided to go softer on everyone at the YMCA in Tandjung Pagar.

Tandjung Pagar these days – you can’t see it for Singapore’s thrusting buildings and shopping precincts, and the little Chinese YMCA, with all its screams still unresolved inside it, has been pulled down to make way for something appropriate to the new Singapore. The new architecture, the Capital Building and the Fountains, are more assertive than the memory of Leo’s bravery and the bravery of the others.

After the conference Hidaka alludes to, those first three YMCA prisoners were brought into an interrogation room and paraded for the Water Kempei Tai officers and Hidaka. Hidaka would tell Lydon it was plain how exhausted they were. They’d been running for three months, since October, and they had not shaven and their clothes had turned solid with salt and then picked up the mud of mangrove swamps in which they’d hidden. It was at that stage that a Kempei Tai captain, Sunitono, announced to them that they would have time for a bath and a shave. He also announced that he would not question them until after Christmas, given that he knew Christmas was so important to them.